Famous Modern Ghost Stories eBook

Thus pondering and oscillating between the poles of
Life and Death, he slowly came back to life, to find
in its suffering and in its joys a shield against
the darkness of the void and the horror of the Infinite.

“No, thou hast not murdered me, Lazarus,”
said he firmly, “but I will take thy life.
Be gone.”

That evening the deified Augustus partook of his meats
and drinks with particular joy. Now and then
his lifted hand remained suspended in the air, and
a dull glimmer replaced the bright sheen of his fiery
eye. It was the cold wave of Horror that surged
at his feet. Defeated, but not undone, ever awaiting
its hour, that Horror stood at the emperor’s
bedside, like a black shadow all through his life;
it swayed his nights, but yielded the days to the
sorrows and joys of life.

The following day, the hangman with a hot iron burned
out Lazarus’ eyes. Then he was sent home.
The deified Augustus dared not kill him.

* * * *
*

Lazarus returned to the desert, and the wilderness
met him with hissing gusts of wind and the heat of
the blazing sun. Again he was sitting on a stone,
his rough, bushy beard lifted up; and the two black
holes in place of his eyes looked at the sky with
an expression of dull terror. Afar-off the holy
city stirred noisily and restlessly, but around him
everything was deserted and dumb. No one approached
the place where lived he who had miraculously risen
from the dead, and long since his neighbors had forsaken
their houses. Driven by the hot iron into the
depth of his skull, his cursed knowledge hid there
in an ambush. As though leaping out from an ambush
it plunged its thousand invisible eyes into the man,—­and
no one dared look at Lazarus.

And in the evening, when the sun, reddening and growing
wider, would come nearer and nearer the western horizon,
the blind Lazarus would slowly follow it. He
would stumble against stones and fall, stout and weak
as he was; would rise heavily to his feet and walk
on again; and on the red screen of the sunset his
black body and outspread hands would form a monstrous
likeness of a cross.

And it came to pass that once he went out and did
not come back. Thus seemingly ended the second
life of him who for three days had been under the
enigmatical sway of death, and rose miraculously from
the dead.

The Beast with Five Fingers

BY W.F. HARVEY

From The New Decameron,
by Various Hands. Copyright, 1919, by
Robert M. McBride and
Company. By permission of the publishers.

When I was a little boy I once went with my father
to call on Adrian Borlsover. I played on the
floor with a black spaniel while my father appealed
for a subscription. Just before we left my father
said, “Mr. Borlsover, may my son here shake
hands with you? It will be a thing to look back
upon with pride when he grows to be a man.”